White Lights
by Petronia
Summary: A Christmas - Yule, rather - vignette, set just before the party heads out for Jenova's Crater. Cid, Vincent, Glacier Lodge, and thermal engineering.


**White Lights**

_For Talya_

* * *

There is no fireplace in the room, and it is sweltering.

Cid curses to himself, under his breath so as not to disturb the sleep of the other occupant. Or perhaps Vincent is not sleeping; it's often difficult to tell. He fumbles in the dark anyway, struggling into his pants, slipping bare feet into boots. There is a temperature dial on the wall, but a cursory examination tells him the control is jammed. More curses rises to Cid's lips, repressed with difficulty, and he crosses the room. He has to give the glass door a sharp jerk before it would slide open, but the first blast of cold air feels like bliss. He runs his hands over his face and steps out gingerly, onto the balcony. He does not close the door behind him.

There is a dusting of snow on the wood beneath his soles.

Their room is on the third floor. Enough to see all the way to the mountains, if it were day. If the moon hung a few inches higher in the sky. The night is bitterly chilly, but Cid is overheated to the point that it is more an abstraction than a matter of imperative. He pats his trouser pockets, retrieves his cigarettes, a box of matches. A sharp spike of sulfur, and Cid tilts his head back, exhaling a long stream of smoke.

Only a sliver of moon. There are no other windows lit, at this time of the night; Glacier Lodge is dark and silent. Barely any Yulelights either, Cid notices, though by rights it should be the height of the tourist season. None blinking or multicoloured, only strings of tiny white icicle lights outlining porches and gables. It's a scene in mezzotint: black pines, grey houses, white lights and white moon and white snow.

There is no sound behind him, and merely the tiniest disturbance of air. Cid turns all the same. Vincent leans against the frame of the door, arms folded. He's put off his cloak, and is dressed as he always is underneath: white shirt, black trousers. Cuffs and collar undone.

So. Not asleep, then.

"It's cold out here," Vincent says, emerging from the shadow. He doesn't look any colder than Cid feels. White skin, black hair, white moonlight fading even his eyes to monochrome – but if Cid reaches out and touches him he would be as warm as flame. "Couldn't you sleep?"

Cid shakes his head. "Couldn't breathe is more like it. Stuffy as hell in there." There are other reasons he's up – other reasons they're both up, likely – Cid rolls the cigarette between his fingers. The scent of burning tobacco is acrid and warm, overlying the crystalline air. He can't feel the sharp edges just yet. "Plus I was sweating like a goddamned pig. It's the way they heat this place. You know how they heat this place?"

Vincent tilts his head. "...Geothermic, I'd thought. Hot springs?"

"Shit, no. Or I'd be _there._" Drag on the unfiltered end again, smoke hitting his lungs. "It's not permafrost here yet, believe it or not. You'd have to head into the fucking glaciers. But dig down – two feet, thirty inches, thereabouts – and the ground stays the same temperature year round. So what you do is, you build a freezer and cool it _down._"

"The ground?"

"Yeah. Before they build a house here – 'fore they even so much as pour the foundation – they dig a hole and lay about a quarter mile of refrigeration piping. Right in the soil, coiled up. The other end runs through your walls with the plumbing. Then when you got your house built, you throw that switch." Cid grins. "Simple principle of the liquid heat pump. Cools the ground underneath by two degrees standard, the antifreeze comes back up at a pressurised hundred twenty. _Just_ like a freezer, with your house as the hot air vent. Uses about as much fuel as a samovar."

"Impressive," Vincent murmurs.

"Yeah, well, it's no good if the dial is fucked." The cold is beginning to impinge on his consciousness, but without much urgency as yet. Cid steps up to the balcony edge, looks out over the town. "Damned few lights..."

Junon is a frenzy of coloured lights and blinking displays, this time of year. Even Cid's hometown puts on a good show. But Glacier Lodge is far off the reactor grid, and Cid suspects he'd be none too eager to waste juice on outdoor bulbs himself if he has to chop wood to feed the generator. There's a strange charm to the tiny white lights, though, if you gaze at them long enough: in the way they refract off icy stalactites, set the snowdrifts to glittering with almost-rainbows...

Tomorrow they'll leave town; find a way up into the mountains.

Will the centre hold, then?

The quiet is hypnotic. He lets the cigarette burn to almost nothing between his fingers before he remembers to stub it out. There is the shadow of movement in the corner of his eye as Vincent leans back against the wooden railing beside him, disturbing the layer of accumulated snow.

"It's past, you know," he says.

Cid's thoughts lurch. Meanings flicker through his mind, the words an echo of imperfectly suppressed preoccupation. Things gone too far to take back. Damage done, old dreams. Vincent's voice when he says, _Hojo..._ Not so long ago, the body of a girl sinking into nothingness, green and watery, and then dark. "What's past?"

Dark too Vincent's eyes, in this light. But there's a curve to his lips, the hint of a smile. "Yule," he said.

Cid lets his breath out explosively. "Shit..." Vincent just keeps looking at him with that not-quite-smile, and he begins to laugh, sheepish. "Shit. You're right. It was getting close to it when we left Wutai." Which was two weeks ago. It may as well be a lifetime. He's willing to bet the rest of their companions have lost track; not one of them has said a word about it. "What are you telling me, that they only keep the fancy lights up the one week the tourists come? That they've taken them down already?... Holy mother of Shiva. Yule. Spent crawling in the motherfucking jungle, in the _heat,_ covered in mud, not a drop of booze within fifty fucking miles... That's the pits, man. Rock bottom. Thanks for reminding me."

"You're welcome," Vincent says. He reaches up – with the human hand, though Cid knows he's capable of as much delicacy with the other – and brushes the outside of his fingers against the stubble of Cid's cheek. The touch is unconscionably warm, and makes Cid shiver in contrast. "Now come in. Time enough for the cold tomorrow."

There is that, Cid thinks, and so when Vincent takes him by the hand he follows. They leave the balcony door open an inch to let out the stuffiness; the room is just as warm, but it seems to matter less. And words are small currency between them.

_Fuck the date then,_ Cid decides later, giddy, parched lips tracing a trail down Vincent's inner thigh. (Pale, but teeth don't mark him, and he's stronger than Cid when he wants to be. It's only the impression of fragility, that birdlike, feverish warmth. Always.) They have left such things behind, all of them gone far beyond their common lives, and if they are to set terms anew then why not for this as well? They've each paid their price. Even thoughts of turning back are past. They choose to be in this place, choose to fight, choose to believe—

Vincent gasps softly, hair falling like shadows across his face. His hips twist upward, and this isn't _comfort,_ no, more like a position of strength—

Choose their own fates—

_We're going to make our own answers from now on. That's who we've decided to be._

Something there feels like understanding, like a revelation, and afterward Cid sprawls across sweat-dampened sheets and realises he cannot hold onto it at all. Only a fleeting impression of clarity, fragmented like white light on snow. His fingers wind themselves into Vincent's hair.

"Still Yule as far as I'm concerned," he mutters, because it's the last thing he remembers thinking. Vincent laughs softly, a puff of air against the crook of Cid's elbow, and shifts closer.

"A merry one, then," he says. "Sleep."

* * *

_— Montreal, December 2002 _


End file.
